


tell me the hour of light

by fideliant



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: F/M, M/M, Post-Reichenbach, References to Drug Use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-05
Updated: 2013-07-05
Packaged: 2017-12-17 19:12:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/871030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fideliant/pseuds/fideliant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s always thoughts of Sherlock that make it difficult to breathe all of a sudden, that make John grit his teeth and stay as if there’s something he’s trying to prove.</p>
            </blockquote>





	tell me the hour of light

**Author's Note:**

> Huge, huge, huge thanks to demosthenes, my compatriot in everything conceivably fandom, for the very helpful laser-eye beta on this one.

John keeps himself in Baker Street for a little over half a year after Sherlock dies. The first few months drone past, a stiff blur of grief scratching on confusion. He wakes to summer days in what feels like the wrong flat in the wrong universe, where the violin holds its silence at three o’ clock in the morning and he only makes enough breakfast for one. He can’t break out of it, as much as he tries, and by the end of August most of the time he’s just waiting to finally go to pieces. That’s alright with him; it always seemed inevitable, anyhow, and if nothing else, he takes some minimal comfort in the fact that Sherlock won’t have to see him crumble.

But then remarkably, impossibly, that doesn’t occur. There’s no moment where he stops functioning entirely just because Sherlock isn’t a part of his life anymore, and eventually John accepts that it’s never going to happen. In lieu of that, he goes out for long walks in the park, he shops for groceries, and he brings Sherlock flowers whenever he can. He’s not sure how to feel about all this, but his therapist tells him that it’s good, it’s progress, and before John can think of a way to prove her wrong, Christmas is upon him all of a sudden, the one time of year when he actually feels like an arse for harbouring any measure of negativity, even though he doesn’t like Christmas as a holiday that much anyway, and he finds it in himself to let it go just that once.

He spends Christmas Eve at Sherlock’s grave, lights a candle there and watches it burn in the snow. _Happy Christmas, Sherlock._

Entering the new year, Ella begins to talk a lot about _moving on._ What she really means by that is anyone’s guess, but John receives one of those anonymous texts preaching new beginnings and all that auld lang syne stuff, and after he deletes it he keeps thinking about her words in the literal sense for some reason. He finds himself Googling rental prices in Dorset and he mails his resume out to a couple of hospitals in the region on an impulse, not expecting any to get back to him. Except, of course, one of them does.

The train to Poole is a two-hour ride, and because the universe either hates or loves John, it turns out that his interviewer is a veteran, too — ex-RAMC, just like him — and John can more or less tell that the job’s his from the moment they exchange a salute before taking their seats.

“Anything else you want to add?” she asks right before ending the interview, a token formality.

_Learned the clarinet at school,_ John thinks, but he decides against recycling that particular modicum of levity. For the best, really, seeing as how his last job had turned out with that parting shot, and he believes himself above deliberately jinxing his chances a second time.

When the position is offered to him via post a week later, it takes all of John’s self-control not to turn it down on the spot. He can’t deny that he needs the income, but Poole Hospital is over a hundred miles away from London and he’s certainly not looking to move. He knows that it’s ridiculous, not being able to picture himself anywhere else but in London, here in Baker Street where the odd rotting finger or toe still turns up every now and then, but he can’t help it. He’s had two whole years in 221B and there has never been a day where it doesn’t feel like home, with all its messes and bad telly nights and human body parts and _Sherlock_ —

But Sherlock’s dead, now, and a tiny voice at the back of John’s mind suggests that maybe, just maybe, _he_ was what always made it home to him. Well, not anymore.

So John takes the job and leaves for Dorset to start his life all over again. He gets a small Verwood flat that’s a thirty-minute bus ride from the hospital and moves in at the end of January. A day after he gets everything unpacked, John replenishes the empty tea caddy in the kitchen and throws out the last of the boxes. Then, he settles back in a chair with a warm cup of tea and gazes out the window at the streets, where every square inch of pavement has been covered by a thin layer of shoeprint-speckled snow.

***

The thing about Verwood that John dislikes the most is how it’s absolutely nothing like London at all. It’s a moderately-sized parish that reminds him of his hometown in Surrey, where he’d sworn never to return after escaping to med school at eighteen. The roads are nearly empty at noon, the air is crisp and clear with spring, and the tallest buildings are no more than three floors high. It’s so dull that John swears the returning aches in his leg are a direct result of that; where London has failed to drive him completely out of his mind, he thinks with a degree of certainty that Verwood will finish what was started there, no question about that.

In the meantime, he gets to breaking in the new flat, because John didn’t pay six hundred pounds up front to mope about the place, as much as the temptation stands. It’s a small flat, furnished to comfortably house one person, although the double bed in the bedroom makes it cozy enough for a couple. The landlady’s no Mrs Hudson, but she does leave a welcome note on the table along with a tin of biscuits, which turn out to be ginger snaps, his favourite, and John thinks they’ll get along just fine. There are no bones or loose teeth lying about the place, at least to the best of John’s knowledge, but he’s fairly sure of that. Still doesn’t stop him from checking his cups before using them, better safe than sorry.

Ultimately, it’s not Baker Street, and it’s definitely not home, but at the end of each day he can't bring himself to leave. It’s always thoughts of Sherlock that make it difficult to breathe all of a sudden, that make John grit his teeth and stay as if there’s something he’s trying to prove.

***

There are days where he loses track of himself. He never stops feeling out of place in Verwood, a constant subliminal niggle at the back of his mind like a thought gone rogue. At three months after making the move, nearly every surface in the flat remains foreign to him and he spends too much time treading around memories that aren’t there, as though he’ll round a corner someday and his past will ambush him just like it did all the time back in 221B, where Sherlock is in the furniture, the curtains, in every pause and every breath of air.

It still creeps up on John without him knowing, sometimes. Even this far from London he can’t shake being dogged by dreams of running and nightmares of falling, but it is to be expected. Continents away, John can still feel the burn of sand against his skin if he closes his eyes; he’s not so unrealistic as to think that a hundred miles is enough to throw off whatever continues to tether him to the life he left back in London. The memories he refuses to dwell on take form in his dreams, of which there are many but he only distinctly recalls three, each one a night ending in:

a) long cab ride home to Baker Street,

b) _this phone call, it’s my note,_ or

c) bed, Sherlock’s arms wrapped tight around him, a whisper of breath slivering down the back of his neck.

He can’t explain the third one. John thinks he just made it up, a fiction as real as Richard Brook. He likes — _liked_ Sherlock, but not in that manner, they had both said so themselves the first night they met, and it’s never been like that between them, not really.

_Yes you are,_ Irene had said, once, but she’d gotten it all wrong, just like everyone else. He’d decided a long time ago that there would never be anyone who would truly understand.

Putting that aside, John does the best with his new life in Dorset. Becoming a doctor again is easy enough, he never stopped being good at what he does, and it’s not like his wits ever died on him like Sherlock did. He keeps to himself at work, however, and is aware that his colleagues perceive him as insular and distant, despite them always making sure to mutter when they think he’s out of earshot. He can’t find a friend in any of the other doctors. The nurses think him gloomy and never call him by his first name even when talking behind his back. His efforts to be genial only make it more agonizing for everyone all around, and John gives up any hope of fitting in after a while.

As the weeks tick away, he becomes someone else. He calls Mrs Hudson every Friday night to ask about her hip, because it’s always nice to hear a friendly voice in Verwood where every face belongs to a stranger. He cleans his gun daily out of habit, not necessity, and tries not to think what anyone in the neighbourhood might have to say if they ever found out. On Saturdays, he goes out for walks where his leg allows and has noonday coffee at the same roadside cafe. Some nights he attempts to update his blog and gets a few sentences in before he ends up backspacing the entire thing. There’s nothing to write about even if he wanted to, anyway.

It gets to a point where he can’t even recognise who he is from the things he does anymore. John Watson doesn’t live in a country town where it feels as though everyone knows each other and he’s the odd one out, a visitor stuck in transit. John Watson doesn’t watch telly late at night with the curtains drawn and snicker at all the bits where they mispronounce their words because it’s the only thing he can laugh at without feeling guilty. Most of all, John Watson doesn’t live in a world without Sherlock Holmes, who drags him to crime scenes and does incredible things and has a wonderful mind but is often too smart for his own good and needs John there to keep him grounded.

Whoever John Watson is, or was, he’s sure as hell not him.

***

It is the twelfth of June again. It’s the anniversary of the day Sherlock took his own life.

At the hospital, John signs extra clinic duty and works overtime until the sun rises on the following morning. His colleagues don’t ask any questions, but then again, they never do.

***

Eight months and two weeks in, a familiar face ambushes John at the hospital cafeteria line.

Someone taps him on the shoulder, and he turns around. “Hello!” he hears, and takes a few seconds to put a name to the face and voice.

“Oh, er, hello,” John replies. It’s his interviewer, from back in January. “Mary, wasn’t it?”

She smiles. “Not bad, you still remember. I would’ve thought you’d have forgotten me by now.”

It’s been so long since anyone smiled at him — actually, genuinely _smiled_ — that John doesn’t quite know how to respond to this. Part of him wants to smile back while an equally insistent part wants him to simply walk away before anything can escalate, and all in all it leaves him rooted to the spot, looking as bewildered as he feels. He decides that he should just nod and stop talking now, find the middle ground and quit while he’s ahead, but before he can act on it, the next thing Mary says is, “Listen, I was thinking, John, do you want to get coffee sometime?”

This is when the nod slips out, followed by the no talking bit, to which Mary grins again and says, “Lunchtime tomorrow, the cafe across the street. I’ll get us a table.” She touches him on the arm, a small, intimate gesture that he can’t make sense of, and then leaves the queue, after which John has to think on it for a while before what he’d intended to order comes back to him.

Did he just get asked out on a date?

***

Mary Morstan is the poster woman for every army recruitment ad ever spawned. Born in Suffolk, the top of her class at university, she signed up with the RAMC immediately after graduating from med school and has a number of tours in Iraq under her belt. She is very much like John in lots of ways that he can relate to, like how her final tour had ended in her being shipped back to England with a bullet hole in her knee and an abdomen full of shrapnel to boot.

“Makes airport security a real bitch,” she jokes, tapping a spot just above her left kidney, and John has to smile at that. It’s not everyone who can make light of something which has to cause chronic pain on a daily basis and mean it; he would know.

There are other things he notices about Mary, too. For instance, that she wears plain, tasteful cardigans under her lab coats, providing a rather amusing contrast to the jumpers John knows he gets laughed at for. She smiles an awful lot, which John finds frankly obscene until she explains that as a surgeon it helps with the nerves. When she has tea, she drinks it without any milk or sugar, solidifying his impression of her as a health nut until she overturns it with a declaration of her fervent love of Starburst candies. Again, odd, but it fascinates John and leaves him curious, just enough to start asking about her as a preliminary — her hobbies, her likes, things which friends ought to know about each other.

Above and beyond all of that, Mary opens up to him with astonishing ease. Over their fourth cup of coffee in the span of a week, she confides in John the pressures she faced in her adolescence, what it was like growing up with four older brothers already earmarked for success, how her parents openly expressed doubt that she would ever make it past secondary school. She talks about her service in Iraq, and John respects how she only mentions the names of those whom she couldn’t save. Then she goes on to her injury and discharge, and begins to cry while recanting her experience with what they gave her for the pain, the years when she’d fallen to the bottom of a pill bottle and had to claw her way out on her own.

Watching her, he has to wonder if she’s told another person any of this before him. He gets the sinking feeling that she hasn’t.

When Mary confesses the fact that she still has trouble trusting herself with a prescription pad, he takes her hand and leaves it there for a minute. While he was with Sherlock, John had always been the one to identify a sensitive situation when it presented itself, but now, here with Mary whom he can relate to in many ways, he doesn’t know what’s the right thing to say. John has a number of platitudes in mind, but he thinks that Mary probably has enough faith in him to not to resort to any of them, has probably gone through the whole mill of those herself, and so he doesn’t.

Instead, he starts telling her about Sherlock Holmes, this man who always seemed to know everything and observed what others merely saw. Mary’s never heard of him, and John likes that. There’s a whole profile of Sherlock which he gets to fill in for her, and in a way it’s like honouring his memory, getting to tell someone else what John has always known to be the truth about him. By the end of recounting as much as he’s willing to reveal for the time being, John’s voice has given out and it’s Mary’s turn to be holding his hand in a gesture of reassurance.

“Sounds like he was a bit of an idiot,” Mary tells John softly, her lip quirking. Of all the options John had been dreading, it’s the absolute best thing she could have said.

A laugh that’s close to a cackle escapes him, and John finds no guilt in it whatsoever. “You have no idea,” he replies, shaking his head, and he has to clench his other hand under the table to stop it trembling. John hasn’t talked about Sherlock in the past tense since his funeral — he’d hated it then and he hates it even now, one of those things he thinks he’ll never get used to.

“Were you and him…?”

“Oh, no. Jesus, no,” he replies, a little too quick on the uptake. It’s been a while since anyone’s made that misunderstanding, but nevertheless the reflex to correct kicks in just as instinctively. “We…we were colleagues. He was my friend.” _Friend._ The word feels dirty in his mouth, like a lie polished to vaguely resemble the shape of something true.

Mary’s hand remains on his, her thumb rubbing absently over his knuckles. “He was a very lucky man to have known you,” she says.

John swallows. There is a roughness on his tongue that he blames on the coffee, the scalding heat of it. He looks down at their hands on the table and thinks about the last time he touched Sherlock, cutting the memory short right before the part where he feels for a pulse with his fingers and can find none. “Not exactly,” murmurs John, and he lifts his eyes to look straight at Mary. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

There is no answer to that which either of them can say out loud.

***

The dating begins well into the year. They go out to plays and movies and country dances, most of which Mary asks him out to. John feels terribly sheepish for not reciprocating as much, but Mary’s had close to six years in Dorset in comparison to his nine months, and she knows her way around the county. At any rate, she doesn’t seem to mind. She even knows Verwood better than John does, and points out the places that serve cheap alcohol to prove it. John’s more impressed by this feat than he thinks he should be.

For Christmas that year he gets them both a seaside room at Bournemouth over the weekend. Mary kisses him and takes him out to dinner at an Italian restaurant that resembles Angelo’s a whole lot down to the candles on every table in the place. John doesn’t have the heart to suggest that they go someplace else. She’s displayed saintlike patience with him dealing with his ghosts as it stands, and he has had it with always making things about him when it’s Mary who endures his many awkward silences, who can never bring him to a string recital because the sound of violins reminds John too much of Sherlock.

This is what John repeats to himself when it’s spring all over again and he realises that March has come to fill him with dread. It’s a month of anniversaries that stick to him and cling on against all odds — there’s the affair of the Chinese smuggling ring which had culminated in John’s first kidnapping; the day he first heard the name _Jim Moriarty;_ when Irene Adler had reappeared in Baker Street only to die once more not too long after. He had drawn an iota of hope from that last one the previous year, imagining that he was going to come back to his Verwood flat one day in March and find Sherlock in his bed, hale and whole and _alive,_ most of all, and John would have been too relieved to wake him or beat the living shite out of him.

John doesn’t make that mistake this time round. When Mary tells him that she’s gotten them tickets for the circus that’s in town, he bites back the urge to warn her off it. It’s not even Chinese, but it’s close enough to get John’s stomach in a knot. They do go to the circus, eat disgustingly sweet popcorn, suffer through a couple of rides, and Mary even wins John a stuffed bear at a cork gun game. “Had the best score in my section, if you can believe it,” she says, depositing the toy into his arms.

The bear has a miniature coat on and is wearing a silly-looking hat. Studying it, John’s at a loss what to do until Mary tugs him along with another ride in her sights, and when the carriage they’re sharing goes up, up, and up the roller coaster tracks, he braces himself and hollers to the rushing wind, lets the impending motion sickness crowd out whatever thoughts of Sherlock that have managed to rise to the surface.

At the end of the day, there are no Oriental-style warnings and no one gets kidnapped or worse, shot in the chest with a giant crossbow quarrel. John doesn’t really know what he’d been expecting in the first place, but all the same it’s easier to breathe once they have exited the grounds and left every last blinking circus light far behind them.

***

One day, when John gets back to his flat after a dinner date with Mary, there is one Mycroft Holmes standing at the front door, suit and tie and umbrella and all.

John doesn’t know how Mycroft managed to ferret him out of hiding, but he’s not surprised in the slightest. Maybe it’s because John is too angry at the sight of him to feel anything else, and with that in mind, he will not let himself think about Downing Street and the last time they had spoken. He strides to the door and glares up at Mycroft, a hand plugged into the pocket of his jeans to fish around for his key.

“Hello, John,” Mycroft says, his voice a paradigm of amicability. He actually looks weary, which is a first. Thinner, too, in the face and around the sides, but the last thing John is going to do is comment on anything which might remotely make Mycroft feel even the tiniest bit better about himself. He never wants Mycroft Holmes to be happy again so long as he lives, if that’s possible.

“Hello,” John replies, keeping his inflection rigid and formal. It’s a step down from punching him in the face, but if John got arrested for doing the same to the Chief Sup, he’d rather not find out what happens to a person who assaults the living embodiment of the British Government.

“You look well,” Mycroft observes.

John sighs as his fingers wrap around the hilt of his key. It’s not too late to try and stab Mycroft to death with it; John thinks that Sherlock would give him his blessings, but that’s not the point. “What do you want, Mycroft?” he finally asks.

Far from providing a straight and honest answer, Mycroft does a little twirl with his umbrella and leans on it with both hands, his expression perfectly neutral. “How have you been, John?”

“Stop it,” John warns. He doesn’t know why Mycroft’s here, but he wants no part of it whatsoever. “Just…don’t.”

Mycroft inclines his head. “I only meant —”

“I know what you meant.” John forces himself to stay calm and thinks about the cup of chamomile he’ll have to make once this is over and he’s safely back in his flat, where the only things he could potentially abuse are all inanimate and incapable of feeling pain.

“I apologise,” Mycroft says, but it comes out silky and wholly unpalatable. “John, I want you to know that if there’s ever anything you need —”

The door clicks open and John steps in without looking back. “I need you to leave,” he says into the darkness, every word heavy with measured anger, and then, “Please.”

He can feel Mycroft’s pitying eyes on his back when the elder Holmes says, “He would have wanted me to take care of you, John.”

The words stick in John’s throat, like the muscles there have become paralysed all at once. “I can take care of myself,” John manages, then he closes the door behind him and leans against it, collapsing into a small pile on the welcome mat where he stays with his eyes closed for what feels like ages.

***

His leg hurts.

Mary notices, of course, and cuts down on her strides so as to not leave John straggling behind. She does not even remotely suggest using a cane. The concern she shows has none of that toxic pity stitched in because John knows she’s among the few who could possibly understand what it feels like to be subjected to that, and also her desire to help is one born of pure sincerity. That’s just how Mary has always been, one of the many reasons why he loves her so.

“I’ve a friend at St. George’s,” she informs him as they walk from the hospital to the bus stop across the street. “He’s looked at somatoform disorders quite a bit; do you want me to give him a ring?”

John smiles. “I’ll be alright, it’s fine.” There’s nothing any specialist can tell him that he isn’t already aware of.

Mary returns his smile, but it’s sad and helpless and everything else that it shouldn’t be. It makes John’s chest hurt, like it’s too full to the point of overflow. “I’m sorry,” she says.

Incredulous, John laughs, long and disbelieving. “What for?”

“It’s only just. You know.” She looks at him, a wavering in her eyes. “I wish there was more I could do.”

And that’s all it takes for the guilt to well up inside John like river water behind a dam, because Mary is loving and gentle and sweet and she doesn’t deserve any of this from him, even as he’s never intended for it to be this way. He laces his fingers through hers, draws her close for a kiss. “You’re doing just fine,” he murmurs over her lips, and when she smiles back into the kiss John closes his eyes and will not let himself think of Sherlock at all.

***

The first night they have sex, they have had a glass of red wine each and are watching reruns of _Britain’s Got Talent_ on late night television.

Before Piers Morgan can buzz out an act involving 2B pencils and a thong, they’re kissing on the sofa and John’s hands are on Mary’s back, lifting her shirt up and unhooking her bra. John doesn’t have condoms in his bathroom, but Mary is perfectly content with letting him stick his fingers into her while she strokes him off, and by the time Amanda Holden is done consoling the contestant over the fact that there’s nothing remarkable about snapping things in half with your arsecheeks, they’re both panting and undone and John can’t remember where the tissue’s gone to but is fairly sure that it’s around on the floor somewhere.

“I love you,” Mary whispers.

John shivers against her and tries to attribute it to the cold. He puts his lips to Mary’s collarbone without a word in return, wondering what it is about him or her that has made him feel little more than a spectator in the last five minutes they’ve had with each other.

***

They see each other for another year before she breaks it off with him. It’s much kinder than he thinks he’s entitled to — she does it objectively and honestly, points to the incontrovertible fact that they’ve been becoming increasingly distanced even with talks of moving in together, and makes sure to place emphasis on how she holds no ill will and wants to remain friends with him. Accordingly, John can’t fault her. No one in their right mind would appreciate playing second fiddle to a ghost, not even for love, and although she strictly keeps any mention of Sherlock out of it, it’s plain enough in the given explanation that he sees through without meaning to.

“Sorry,” John says, and then, “Thank you,” because he means it, before he realises exactly how bizarre he sounds. That’s not what normal couples say when they break up, is it? At least she’s telling him face-to-face like any decent person would, rather than by text or over the phone. He still has trouble answering his calls when he doesn’t recognise the number, as if he picks up he’s going to be back in that carpark watching Sherlock step off a roof all over again.

Mary kisses his cheek and shakes her head. When John can look at her again, there’s a small grin on her lips. “Oh, John,” she says, and from those two words John knows that there’s no need to explain himself. She’s grateful for the time they’ve spent with each other, too.

In the months to come after Mary ends it between them, John will hate himself on more than one occasion for allowing things to turn out the way they have. He thinks often of what his life could have been with Mary — if they could have had a home together, a legacy, a family. He’s back to being lonely again, a doctor in a small town with too few friends and even fewer people he can speak to, but whenever he feels hollow inside he reminds himself that all of this was his choice, and he has no right to drag anyone else into it, much less anyone as magnanimous and whole-hearted as Mary.

She still smiles at him when they pass in the hospital corridors and trades a salute when John bumps into her at lunchtime. As far as he knows, she doesn’t start seeing anyone else, and quite properly, neither does he.

***

It is John’s third summer in Dorset and the hay fever season is at its peak. Living this close to the country, it strikes the general populace every year with a ferociousness he’s never seen the likes of in London, usually only dying down when August lapses into September. The year is still taking its time with July, a month John remembers as _the_ month after, and barring June it’s when he always clocks the most overtime as a result of the need to be occupied at all times of the day.

He’s gotten off the last bus out from Poole one day and is walking back to his flat when he sees a shadowy figure loitering on the kerb outside. John is thinking that the height on him is somewhat familiar when he gets close enough and the person turns around, stepping into the streetlight.

John drops his briefcase.

_What —_

“John,” Sherlock says, sounding tired.

Ghost, has to be, a figment of his imagination. Actor. Body double sent by Mycroft as a sick joke. Or, or: this is it. It’s taken three years, but he’s finally gone blessedly, irrevocably mad.

“John,” Sherlock repeats. He takes a step closer, fingers flexing against his thighs.

John is unable to move from where he is. His tongue feels thick and stupid inside his mouth, glued to the back of his gums. He can’t seem to pull any words out of the sudden constriction that his throat has become, and it feels as though he has lost the ability to breathe, because _Sherlock,_ oh, God, _Sherlock —_

“I’m back,” Sherlock continues, his voice confident and strong. He looks different without the coat and scarf, the chestnut-brown hair a momentary distraction from the unmistakableness of his cheekbones. “You weren’t in Baker Street anymore, and…and Mrs Hudson told me where you had gone, even though I could have figured it out on my own given enough time, but. I suppose that isn’t important, not really —”

“Sherlock,” John whispers, much closer to him than he remembers.

Sherlock looks down at John, a severe look forming around the thin and inexpressive line of his lips. “John,” he returns. His expression is unreadable, but he reaches out and touches John’s wrist with his fingers, and this is how John knows that he’s real, Sherlock’s real, in flesh and blood and with a bad haircut and every last square inch of him is not dead and buried six feet under in a London cemetery a hundred miles from where they are.

When John suddenly has the collar of Sherlock’s shirt bunched in his right hand and his left has formed into a fist, he thinks _subtext._ When he swings the punch with all of his might and Sherlock’s nose cracks under his knuckles, John hears _I had bad days_ and it’s the best damn thing he’s ever felt in years.

Later, in John’s flat, Sherlock is seated on the sofa with a wad of bloody tissues pressed against his face while John makes them both tea. Sherlock’s eyes wander all around the flat, taking in the shelves, the furniture, the seafoam green wallpaper. He regards John silently, tracking his movements from the kitchen to the living room and blinking at him when John sets the cups on the coffee table in front of them. John checks Sherlock’s nose, now back to being a doctor again, and shushes him whenever he tries to get a word in.

“It’s not broken,” John says, although there isn’t a bone in his body which doubts that Sherlock would have deserved it and then some. “Keep the pressure on, the bleeding should stop in a couple of minutes.”

Sherlock nods and makes a grunting sound, setting the tissues aside and looking to John. There appears to be something he wants to get out but can’t quite put into words. “John,” he finally says, like it’s the answer to every question John’s had in the last three years of living alone.

“Fucking bastard,” John mutters, and looks away. He folds his arms across his chest, willing the ache to recede. His eyes are prickling already and if he cries here, he’s going to have to throw Sherlock onto the streets because John doesn’t think he will ever be able to live it down. In any case, he’s already got half a mind to kick him out and never have anything to do with him again, the smug, lying, conceited —

Then, Sherlock is touching John’s arm from the other end of the sofa, and John flinches. He does not look back at him when Sherlock says, “I’m sorry, it was…I had no choice.”

God, Sherlock sounds exhausted, which doesn’t really make sense because John’s the one who just got off a twenty-hour shift and shouldn’t have any energy to spare for this. Nevertheless, he tightens his fingers like he’s curling them around a hammer, and contemplates striking Sherlock a second time.

“I needed to protect you,” Sherlock intones. There’s a hint of remorse dancing through, something John has never heard out of him before. It makes John loosen his fists, but only just. “If there had been another way, I would have never —” Sherlock stops, and the rest of the explanation falls flat in the silence.

John takes a deep breath and lets it out in a sigh. The urge to hit something subsides. He swivels on the sofa slowly until he is facing Sherlock, pulls another breath in to keep himself from wincing when he meets Sherlock’s gaze. Pale, blue eyes. Not dead after all. Fine.

No, not fine.

Far from fine.

“Jesus,” John finally mumbles, and he buries his face in his hands. He’s cold, the flat’s cold, but he doesn’t make any move to switch on the heater. “Shite, fuck, Sherlock.”

A shuffling noise, the sofa cushion in front of him dips, and Sherlock is wrapping his arms around him before John can move or push him away. John stiffens, taut as a bowstring, when Sherlock pulls him close and holds John against him. Sherlock’s mouth is at his ear and he can sense his lips moving, but John hears nothing and after a long while he feels himself slackening into the embrace.

“I don’t,” John whispers, overridden by a sudden wave of lethargy, and he sways, uncertain, and moves back just enough to lean his forehead on Sherlock’s chest. “You’re,” he tries again, but can’t touch the rest of that sentence; Sherlock rubs circles into the flat of John’s back and whispers his name into his hair, and John lets out a sob, thin and ragged, before he gives in and crumples against him. Sherlock doesn’t seem to be breathing whereas John’s breath keeps on catching in his throat, and he’s leaning on Sherlock, leaning them both into the sofa cushions, clinging on to everything that he’s lost in the three years gone by.

Below him, Sherlock rumbles, again, “I’m sorry,” and his fingers trail down John’s back, settling on the divots at the base of his spine. His breath comes out warm against John’s cheek, his grip on him tightening.

John closes his eyes, sinking into Sherlock and listening to him breathe. He wants to shout, and perhaps hit Sherlock a couple more times, but for now as he is, he’s just so, so tired. Maybe in the morning. He’ll smack Sherlock first thing in the morning, he’s sure. “Don’t go,” he murmurs into Sherlock’s breastbone, drowsing against him, and his voice is low and muzzy in his own ears.

Sherlock’s hand finds its place at the back of John’s neck, stroking languidly. “Never again,” he says, a solemn, soothing promise, and it’s the last thing John hears before he slips away into a heaving sea of a dream where he’s the one who is falling, over and over, and Sherlock is there to catch him, every single time.

***

When John wakes up, he is in his bed. He does not let himself move until he becomes aware of an arm over him, heavy and unmoving, and warmth is flocking against the back of his neck.

_Oh,_ he thinks. _Dream._  Slowly, he opens one eye.

Sunlight.

Morning.

(It’s never morning in these dreams.)

Holding in his breath, John turns over.

Brown curls on the pillow. Pale cheeks.

Sherlock’s still asleep, holding on to him. His fingertips are smooth on John’s skin and his chest is rising with a steady, guided rhythm.

Alive.

John breathes in.

He closes his eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> _Oh, beloved, and there is nothing but shadows_   
> _where you accompany me in your dreams_   
> _and tell me the hour of light._
> 
> _— Love Sonnet XXI,_ Pablo Neruda


End file.
